Aftermath

11

So near and yet so far. Celine stared at the mottled globe of Earth, hanging in front of her and seemingly close enough to reach out and touch.

The old Greeks had a word for it, just as they had a word for most things. It was hubris, an arrogance that defies the gods and invites disaster. According to Reza Armani, expedition mystic, in its journey to Mars the Schiaparelli had moved into the abode of the gods, the space between the planets; now its crew was to pay the penalty.

The added irony was that they had all discussed this possibility. Over and over, on the way to Mars and on the surface itself, they had agreed that the fatal Gotcha! had to be the one you never expected; otherwise, you built contingency plans to deal with it. A thousand things might go wrong on the way to Mars, landing on Mars, exploring Mars, rising from the surface of Mars, and returning from Mars. You had to prepare for all of them and make the tough decisions ahead of time. Only when you were finally in Earth orbit, in the hands of a reentry system and personnel honed to perfection by ten thousand tries, could you at last relax and feel safe.

Celine couldn’t blame the others. She had gone along with the argument. Who could imagine that the reentry system, that whole gorgeous and intricate assembly of people and techniques and hardware and software, might vanish in one flash of free electrons and electric field surge? The Schiaparelli itself had never, even in its designers’ wildest imaginings, been seen as a ship able to endure reentry through Earth’s thick atmosphere. It would disintegrate fifty miles up.

“We have to make a decision pretty soon.” Zoe Nash was seated next to Celine, studying her own displays. “It’s a onetime choice. I think it will be an easy one, but we have to be sure. Ludwig?”

“No change.” He was wearing an earphone and working a miniaturized control pad. To Celine, he looked more like a willowy blond elf than ever. The prospect of disaster was driving them all to their extremes. Zoe was more impatient and demanding. Wilmer was remote and thoughtful. Reza was increasingly strange, oscillating between the manic clown and the aloof mystic. Celine was not sure, but earlier in the day she thought Reza had been weeping. A bad sign, in a group whose time of real stress still lay ahead.

So what had Celine become? Indecisive, probably, to the point where she could see impossible problems in doing anything at all.

“I’m picking up only a few dozen signal sources from Earth,” Ludwig said. “Normally I would expect hundreds of thousands. All the signals are weak, and so far as I can tell with our onboard equipment they are low frequency and omnidirectional. I’d say they’re amateur radio signals. If we wait—”

“What about signals from space sources?” Zoe cut him off in midsentence. The Schiaparelli’s largest’ scopes were trained on the big international space stations, ISS-1 and ISS-2, and their images were showing on her displays.

“The high orbits are broadcasting as usual — I’m receiving regular signals from all the automated geosynchronous birds. My question is whether anyone down below is picking them up.”

“Still nothing from the manned stations?”

“Not a peep. No output from the polar orbiters, either.”

“We have to assume the worst.” Zoe swiveled in her seat. “Anything in low orbit had its electronics wiped out by the EMP. Alta, give me a second opinion.”

Alta was watching in glum silence. She had been studying the same images as Zoe. She took her time before she answered, while Zoe sat and fidgeted impatiently.

“The hatches are invisible on both stations,” Alta said at last. She sounded to Celine like a robot, without hope or feelings. “Even at highest magnification, I can’t tell if they are open or closed. I see no sign of interior lights, but of course they might be turned off to conserve power. I don’t think the high data rate antennae are working. They seem to be pointing in random directions. I see two small single-stage orbiters in docking position at ISS-2, and none at ISS-1. That’s unusual. Maybe there were orbiters at ISS-1, there surely should be. But if they were secured electronically and not mechanically, after the gamma pulse they would have been released. They could be floating quite close to the station; a general sky scan to find them would take quite a time.”

“Time we don’t have.” Zoe turned back to face the screens. “Assuming that the life-support systems failed two weeks ago and no one is presently alive on either station, the general condition of all systems must be deteriorating. We have to pick one and get over to it as fast as we can. I say we head for ISS-2. Any discussion?”

A thirty-second silence followed. Celine found that in itself depressing. The crew of the Schiaparelli had been picked because they were bright, innovative, and opinionated. When no one could think of a second option that was a very bad sign.

“One point,” Alta said at last, and Celine found her hopes rising. “This is not exactly discussion, but it is something that you need to be aware of. Neither of the single-stage orbiters docked at ISS-2 is class three or better. Each one can carry only three people, four at a real pinch.”

The others, without a word, turned and looked at Wilmer Oldfield. He frowned back at them. He out-massed the others by at least fifty percent.

Zoe gave a barking laugh. “Starvation rations for Wilmer, until we’re down on Earth. However we arrange the groupings, we’ll have to split up and ride home in two parties. Anything else? If not, we’ll get this show on the road. Jenny. Trajectory and rendezvous?”

“Computed and stored.” Jenny was like a computer herself, steady and meticulous and unemotional. “I allowed an arbitrary start time up to four hours from now.”

“That’s ample. Alta. Confirmed configuration?”

“I recommend we fly just Section Three over to ISS-2. That gives us more fuel for final maneuvering — but not enough to reach ISS-1 if we don’t like what we find.”

“Understood. Any final questions before we go ahead? Yes, Reza, what is it?”

“My specimens.” He was in his most agitated phase. “The Mars life-forms. I realize we have a strict mass limit—”

“Forget it. No Mars samples. Just our bodies, and our personal effects.”

“I refuse to accept that. These are small, they are light, and they are so valuable—”

Zoe cut him off. “I asked for questions, not arguments. They are valuable samples, and indeed we put great effort into collecting them. We will take them with us to ISS-2. If we can create a safe environment for ’ them there, we will leave them until someone can come up from Earth and retrieve them.”

“Suppose we can’t create a safe environment for them?”

“That will be unfortunate. But, Reza, I assume that if it comes to saving you or saving the samples, it is no contest.”

Reza paused for a long time. Celine thought he was about to get into a shouting match with Zoe. Jenny put a hand on his arm. He looked at her, and then again at Zoe. He cupped his chin and cheek in his hand in a classic pose. At last he said, “I’m thinking.”

Zoe glared at him.

She doesn’t get the reference, Celine thought. And Reza is way out of line. He ought to know that it’s the wrong time for clowning.

“No samples,” Zoe said. “If we take nothing back to Earth except our own selves, that is enough. There will be other expeditions to Mars, but we are the first. And we are going home. We are going home. We have come too far and worked too hard for me to accept anything else.”

Reza scowled, and for another moment Celine thought there would be an open mutiny. Finally he nodded, and so did everyone else. Celine felt that it was she alone, Celine (Cassandra) Tanaka, who deep inside whispered, Perhaps.

Jenny Kopal had programmed a careful approach to ISS-2, one that allowed ample time for close-up inspection. Every sensor on the Schiaparelli — as well as every human eye — was trained on the big station as it slowly turned against a background of stars.

Celine, Ludwig, and Zoe were already in their suits, floating at the open entrance to the Schiaparelli’s main hatch. There was no way to dock the Mars ship at ISS-2 without active cooperation from within the station. The first transition had to be an open-space maneuver.

That held no fears for Celine. She loved EVAs. An antenna repair on the outward trip to Mars, when the Schiaparelli floated eighty million kilometers distant from the home planet, had given Celine and Ludwig Holter the record for both the longest and most distant free space activity. That evening, in her excitement and exuberance, she had seduced Wilmer. He had said afterward, as though describing something as far removed from human control as a stellar flare, “I wondered when that would happen.”

Today would be different, and depressing. Straight ahead lay the station, a dark irregular bulk that answered no queries and offered no signs of life. On the left, filling the sky, was an alien Earth. All the normal circulation patterns of the atmosphere had vanished, replaced by great streaks and whorls of cloud that curved across the equator. The surface beneath was rarely visible on the sunlit hemisphere that faced them; but the Schiaparelli’s onboard sensors had recorded south-to-north wind vectors of up to six hundred fifty kilometers an hour. That exceeded by a wide margin the highest speeds ever reported in Earth tornadoes.

“We have attained zero relative velocity.” Jenny Kopal’s calm voice sounded over Celine’s suit radio. “Distance from ISS-2 is eighty meters.”

“Hold there pending further instructions.” That was Zoe Nash. “All right, no point in waiting. Let’s go.”

She led the way out of the hatch. Celine and Ludwig followed more slowly, drifting across toward the space station. By the time they joined Zoe she was waiting at a point between the two orbiters where a station entry hatch was located. She moved the airlock door a few inches with her suited hand, making it clear from her action that the hatch was not sealed. If the inner lock was open, too, the interior of a large part of ISS-2 would be airless.

Celine, moving abruptly from sunlight to shadow, felt a cold like death inside her. It could only be psychological, because her suit maintained internal temperature control. During the return journey from Mars they had talked often about the return to Earth space, and -the joyful reunion they would have with the staff of the big stations when they docked there.

“The orbiter access external airlock is open.” Zoe spoke for the benefit of those aboard the Schiaparelli. She had the hatch fully open and was moving inside. “The inner door of the lock is not sealed. No mechanical locks are engaged. ISS-2 appears to have been relying on electronic control. That was probably the case everywhere on the station.”

The crew of the station are all dead. Celine added those words only to herself. Everyone on the Schiaparelli was capable of drawing the same conclusion without assistance.

Once they were through the inner airlock door, she and Zoe moved away in different directions. Zoe had assigned their duties in advance. Ludwig would remain outside and determine the condition of the two single-stage orbiters. Celine would head for the control room and decide what elements of ISS-2, if any, might be restored to useful function.

Zoe had reserved the most unpleasant job for herself. She would inspect the station’s living quarters.

But unpleasantness was all relative. Celine, easing her way along the corridor that led to the deep interior and heart of ISS-2, had to push her way past four bodies. They rested against the corridor wall, contorted as they had been at the moment of their deaths. She made a brief inspection, enough to confirm that they had all died in the decompression that followed the failure of the ISS-2’s locks.

It had not been a quick death. This corridor was a hundred feet from the lock, and the air pressure drop to a fatal level had been far from instantaneous. There had been time to reach a bulkhead with its own safety airlock, and learn that it too would not work.

Two of the people were holding hands. Celine shone her suit light on their uniform tags and noted their names: Ursula Klein and Lawrence Morphy. United forever in death. They must have made that final gesture deliberately, and if she lived she would find a way to record the fact. Had they also, the living man and woman who now formed freeze-dried and desiccated corpses, had time enough to realize that the cause of all their problems was a failure of the microchips throughout the whole of ISS-2?

Surely not. The fatal Gotcha! was the one that you never expected; no one had expected this.

Celine recorded the other two names also, and forced herself to keep going. The control room had its own share of horrors. Seven more corpses. Three people, all women, sat in chairs before the control board, where not a warning light glowed or a single display was active. The interior temperature of the chamber, according to Celine’s suit sensors, was hundreds of degrees below freezing. ISS-2 was dead. Unlike its doomed personnel, the station might one day be brought back to life. But that resurrection would require the replacement of thousands, perhaps millions, of electronic components. Celine had no hope that she and her companions could perform such a task with the limited resources available on the Schiaparelli. So far as the Mars expedition was concerned, ISS-2 was a derelict hulk and would remain so.

She made a final inspection of the seven bodies in the control room, again noting from the uniforms the name of every dead individual. She did not know why she was doing it. Earth records would certainly contain identification of everyone on ISS-2.

She did it anyway, a bizarre gesture of final respect. Then with the presentiment of death inside her she drifted back along the corridor to the airlock.

There was no sign of the other two. Zoe must still be inside, while Ludwig was presumably in one of the two orbiters. Celine headed for the nearer, noting as she approached how small it seemed. She had been to orbit and returned from it many times, but always in vehicles ten times the size of this one. It looked like a toy, a single-person reentry pod. And this little bug was supposed to hold three or four of them?

Celine made a determined effort to avoid negative -thinking. This orbiter would take them home, because it had to. She had seen ISS-2, and she knew there was no chance of waiting on the station for a possible rescue from Earth.

Ludwig was inside the orbiter. He had pulled the front off the control board, and was studying what lay behind it using the light of his suit. He turned when Celine’s light added to his in illuminating the panel. “Well? What did you find?”

“What we expected.” She did not want to go into details. “We will have to use these orbiters. Maybe we can scavenge materials from the station, and fuel. But no working electronics.”

He scowled at her. “Marvelous. But not surprising. And not good, because the electronics are shot in both orbiters. The other one is a bit bigger inside than this one, but they have identical computers and identical control systems. We won’t need fuel, because both orbiters have full tanks. But we do need control systems, and that’s going to be a problem. Zoe’s one of the best, but even she can’t fly a reentry without controls.”

“She’s going to if she has to.” It was Zoe’s voice, thin over the radio link. “We all do what we have to do. You two stay where you are, I’m outside the station now and on my way. I’m afraid it’s all bad news inside ISS-2.”

“I don’t think we’ll be forced to a seat-of-the-pants reentry attempt.” Ludwig did not press Zoe for details on what she had found inside the station, any more than he had asked Celine. “These single-stagers, thank God, are built simple. Most of the control surfaces don’t use computers, they’re self-adjusting on reentry to external conditions. And where they do need computers, they’re designed so you can pull and replace the whole box.”

“You mean we can use what we have on the Schiaparelli?” It was the first good news of Celine’s day. “Suppose we need it there?”

“We won’t.” Zoe had reached the hatch and was trying to squeeze inside. “We can take anything from there, because we won’t be needing the Mars ship at all. We’re going home.”

Celine, trying to move to let Zoe in, became even more aware of the cramped interior space of the single-stage orbiters. There was no way that she and Ludwig could admit Zoe. The padded seats would have to come out before a third person could get in. And what would a reentry be like, without cushioning against deceleration forces?

Stop thinking negative. Whatever it’s like, it’s better than the alternative.

Celine turned to Ludwig, who had removed the little cube of the control computer. He was staring at it dubiously. “This sucker is dead. I can replace it with a good one from our ship, but that’s not the hard part. The tricky bit is going to be software. We need the right program routines.”

“Routines which we don’t have.” Even Zoe sounded discouraged for a moment. “The Schiaparelli never expected to need a program for Earth orbit reentry.”

“Routines which we might have,” said a new and unexpected voice. It was Jenny Kopal. She, like the rest of the crew on the Mars ship, had been silently listening in on the discussion.

“How so?” Zoe, like everyone else, deferred to Jenny on all questions related to computer software.

“Back when we were setting up the Schiaparelli data bases, I was given a free hand as to what programs I could load. So I decided it was best to be generous—”

“Thank God for a program pack rat,” Zoe said. “Jenny, I’ve seen you gloating over your master files like a mother hen. I never dreamed it would pay off this way.”

“I thought it best to be generous,” Jenny said calmly. “I loaded every routine in the data base that had a ’space use’ descriptor. They didn’t take up much storage. Even if—”

“I don’t care how much storage they took.” Zoe interrupted again. “The question is, do you have the programs to control reentry of these particular single-stage orbiters?”

“I don’t know. I downloaded many thousands of programs. I’ll have to establish a search with the appropriate parameters.”

“Do that. How long will it take?”

“I can set it up in half an hour. The search will take longer — a lot of the files are on DNA backup storage. Very high packing density, but it has long access times. Maybe three hours.”

“Do it. Ludwig, I want these orbiters ready to receive new hardware as soon as possible. Replace chips wherever we have substitutes on the Schiaparelli. Patch around them if we don’t. And mark the places where the pilot has to take over control of the orbiters and fly them directly.”

“Yeah. Right.” Ludwig stared quizzically at Zoe, then turned back to the dismantled control panel. “Like me to make ’em go faster than light while I’m at it?”

“Save that for next time. Can you finish this in twenty-four hours?”

“Naturally. I’m Superman, remember?”

“Get this ship ready to fly in less than twenty-four hours, and I’ll buy you a new cape.”

Zoe backed out of the hatch. When Celine joined her she was hovering motionless, staring at the great bulk of Earth hanging overhead. Since entering the station, ISS-2 and the Schiaparelli had moved together in their ninety-minute orbit of Earth, and now they faced the nightside of the planet. Ship and station were in an orbit with an inclination of thirty degrees, and at the moment they were close to their northern limit. Celine knew that North America lay beneath them. No lights were visible. The great cities were in darkness, or obscured by heavy cloud. She wanted to believe the second explanation.

“Two days.” Zoe pointed up toward Earth. “Two days at the outside, and we will be there.”

She spoke with total conviction. Celine felt her own surge of confidence. She knew that Zoe as expedition leader and chief pilot might speak optimistically to boost the spirits of the rest of them. But it wasn’t that. This was straight-from-the-heart Zoe Nash, Zoe sure that she could do it, Zoe knowing that nothing could stop her; Zoe able to make things happen so that nothing did stop her. That was why she was the expedition leader.

Zoe said she would be on Earth within two days. Therefore Zoe would, beyond a doubt, be on Earth within two days.